


In the Heart, or In the Head?

by kungfunurse



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Character Study, First Time, M/M, Repli!Team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-09
Updated: 2010-04-09
Packaged: 2017-10-08 20:02:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/79022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kungfunurse/pseuds/kungfunurse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if the Repli!Team didn't die at the end of the episode 'Mortal Coil'?</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Heart, or In the Head?

John paused to look around, impressed with what they'd done with the place. From one little shanty a veritable town had sprung up over the past few years. Buildings stood two and three stories tall, solidly constructed and comfortably hidden inside the mountain's overhang. Late afternoon sunlight lit the area, giving the hidden base a warm, relaxed feel.

"Very nice," he nodded approvingly, turning to himself. "The stained glass windows are new."

"Well, you know, a little taste of home." the Sheppard standing next to him drawled, thumbs hooked into his belt. "C'mon, let me show you the rest. Rodney's over the moon with the latest tech we lifted from the Asuran battle cruisers."

Sheppard thumped him on the shoulder and loped off. "Hey McKay, get the relay up! Tell Ronon to come home, we've got company!"

"Do I _always_ run like a dork, or is that just the nanites?" John murmured hopefully.

"Nah, that's one hundred percent John Sheppard, right there," Rodney smirked, still tapping away on his tablet computer. "The power outputs I'm reading are, well, honestly it's remarkable. Not that I would have expected anything less from myself, naturally," he paused, smirking at his own genius, even second hand. "The natural ores in the mountain shield the power signature from orbit, but now that we're close I can't believe the type of readings I'm seeing. Hmmm..." Rodney trailed off, and John grabbed his elbow, absently steering him around a rock and towards an open doorway.

Ronon and Telya, _his_ Ronon and Teyla, were back on PSR-394, covering for their absent teammates, and not incidentally keeping Ronon and his duplicate separated. The two had a bitter rivalry, the latest score being that the duplicate had banned Ronon from New Sateda. His reasoning was that if the original got Atlantis, then the duplicate got the newly formed city-state named after their homeworld. Ronon had almost knifed his double in the gut before the Sheppards could intervene.

"Here, take care of yourself," he joked, pushing Rodney into the room and at his double. "I've got security updates to deliver."

"You know," the duplicate McKay sniffed as he looked up, "this would all be much more efficient if you'd agree to be uploaded with my-"

"NO!" two Sheppards barked at him, John's duplicate back again and looming in the doorway. The noise startled Rodney from his data daze and he looked up in surprise.

"Oh, what? We're here? Well, show me what you've got," Rodney said, waving impatiently at the Sheppard in the doorway, and pulling away from John's hand on his elbow.

"I'm serious, Rodney," Sheppard warned. "No bluetoothing the humans. For one thing it's a major security breach, and for another-"

"There's no way we could hide something like that during our physicals," John finished. "You _know_ that, McKay."

"Yes, yes, fine. Limit the creation of my genius to analog distribution. You may as well try to create a Stargate that runs on dial-up!"

"Oh, hey, what the sweet baby Jesus is this?" Rodney interrupted, barging past his testy double and plunging his hands into a glowing mass of cables.

"That, my friend, is going to solve all of our energy problems," McKay gloated, turning in his chair and plunging his hands in alongside the human's.

"Quick, while they're busy playing with themselves," John whispered, and Sheppard nodded vigorously, pulling him out by the arm.

"Is that really...?" he trailed off, hooking a thumb back over his shoulder at the lab building behind them.

"Yeah, according to McKay it'll replace the ZPM's, _if_ he can get it to work." Sheppard snorted, his opinion of that clear on his face.

"Still, if we could grow our own energy source, it would certainly make our war against the Wraith a lot less like scooping out the sea with a spoon."

"And the Asurans," Sheppard agreed, swinging them into a squat, stone building. "Teyla and Elizabeth are meeting with the Turoc, and Ronon is still playing king of the hill over on New Sateda, so it's just us today. Want a sandwich?"

"Sure," John shrugged, swinging his field gear into a corner. He followed his double into the mess kitchen, finding the fixings with practiced ease. Five years ago the Replicated team had finally made their second contact with Atlantis, letting them know they were still alive and asking for help. Help to establish a secondary base, to continue their own private war against the Asurans. John had been wary, but cautiously optimistic. He'd hardly expected their little band of outcasts to create a second point of light in the galaxy, forming trading coalitions of their own and helping to motivate the Pegasus natives to unite and confront the dual predators of their galaxy.

The partnership had worked brilliantly, and even now John and his team continued to make regular, if secretive, visits to what he jokingly thought of as his summer home in the mountains.

"Hey, what've you got over there?" Sheppard asked, craning his neck to peer at John's sandwich.

"Well, it's just some of that red sauce that the... wait, are those the purple chip things from Burgent?"

After a minute of assessing the merits of each, both Sheppards cut their sandwiches in half, plopping the other half on their duplicate's plate.

"Hey, mine's smaller!" John complained, examining his half mournfully.

"Not according to McKay," Sheppard quipped, crunching happily into his sandwich.

"All right, all right," John groaned at the terrible pun "Look," he sighed, getting down to business. "The SGC is starting to wonder what we're doing with all the textiles and basic medical supplies we've been requisitioning. I mean, if we're trading them to other cultures, what've we been getting in return, right? Good will as an excuse is only taking us so far, and they're considering sending us another negotiator to staunch the flow of resources out of Atlantis."

"Huh. Well, we knew that the free lunch ticket was gonna run out at some point. Speaking of which," Sheppard said, pointing at John with his half eaten sandwich, "how long do you think you can go on hiding us like this?"

"As long as we need to," John replied firmly, crunching into his cheese and chip sandwich decisively.

"You know what they'll do to you if they find you've been harboring us. We're the ultimate security breach. Aliens that think and look like you-"

"You know what they'll do if they find _you_," John snarled, swallowing hastily. And I don't _care_ what you call yourselves, I don't believe anyone who thinks like me will _ever_ be a security risk to Atlantis or to Earth!"

"I'm just saying," Sheppard shrugged, turning on the good 'ol boy charm. "You're taking quite a risk, continuing to cover for us like this."

"Yeah? What about you? You're risking yourselves every time you step through the Gate, every contact you make. Someday we're gonna make a mistake, you know, and my team will meet up with someone your team's already made contact with."

"It's worth it," Sheppard shrugged again. "Worth it to take those Asuran bastards down, once and for all. Manipulative sons of bitches. Besides, we're already legends. Atlantis, the teams, they tell so many stories about us that no one's gonna notice an extra Colonel Sheppard or Dr McKay running around."

"Yeah, that's been the plan so far," John replied darkly, cleaning up his plate. "Look, I've got some data cells to show you, then we've got to get back. The Gate techs on Atlantis think we're getting some wine from the Merarians, and we'll actually have to trade with them sometime today before we can go home, so..."

John turned to find his replicant close, crowding his personal space and trapping him behind the counter. _Fuck_, and here he was with his gun all the way across the room. Ronon would be so disappointed when John showed up dead.

"Relax," Sheppard soothed, cupping an inhumanly strong hand over John's shoulder. "You can't leave just yet, they're not done."

"Done?" John's eyes narrowed dangerously. And oh crap, he had a sudden flash of McKay calling Ronon's duplicate back as soon as they'd arrived...

"Rodney, what the fuck, RODNEY!" John yelled, then he bit down hard when his duplicate's hand covered his mouth, an arm trapping John's arms to his side in an unbreakable grip.

"Ouch, shit!" Sheppard hissed, hauling John off to a back room and tossing him lightly onto a bed. "That hurt," he accused, closing the door and effectively soundproofing the room.

"What the fuck is the matter with you?" John snarled, looking hopelessly around the bedroom for a weapon.

"No, John, it's what's the matter with you," Sheppard said quietly, his already healed hand reaching out to take John's wrist. "Look at your hands, John. Look at your skin. C'mere, look," he continued, dragging John across the room to the mirror. "Look at your face, John!"

"What? What about it?" John snapped, wondering if a broken mirror would be sharp enough to hurt the man behind him, wondering if there was any way to get free from a man who knew all your strategies as well as you did. "It's the same as it always is!"

"Exactly," Sheppard breathed into his ear, a warm skirl of heat that echoed in John's gut, and when the hell had his replicant decided that personal space was just for humans? "We're just the same, John. Look at me," he insisted, grabbing John's chin and forcing his gaze in the mirror. John was trapped tightly against a hot, wiry, so familiar body, and now he was panting a little for no particular reason. But that was fine, just peachy, because it seemed Sheppard was, too. "Look at us! The same, just the same."

"Well, there's a reason for that," he drawled, trying to sound smooth and unruffled as a drop of sweat crept slowly down his face and over Sheppard's fingers.

"No you dumbass, there's not." Sheppard hissed, pressing his nose and lips against John's ear, dark eyes boring into John's in the mirror. "I'm constantly being regenerated and remade by the nanites. I'm not aging because they won't _let_ me age. What's your excuse?"

John felt a spike of real fear then, and stared helplessly back. The same eyes, the same face, the same faint wrinkles and lines. Just a hint of sliver hair at the temples, but still just a hint, no different from before, no different...

"Jesus Christ," he breathed, his pupils dilating, huge and terrified. "The retrovirus, the fucking _bug_-"

"McKay thinks it was activated again, somehow, when Todd gave you back your life-force all those years ago. You're even less human than I am, John," Sheppard smiled bitterly, finally releasing him and stepping back.

"But what does any of this have to do with McKay?" John demanded, gut clenching with disgust. The bug, the fucking, bug, always that goddamn fucking bug...

"We both know how... unstable you tend to get when you've been separated from your team," Sheppard smiled a hard, sharp little smile. "You do really dumb things, like fly against orders into government prohibited countries. You crash planes trying to rescue dead Air Force buddies. You wake up alien races to rescue dead commanding officers."

John edged slowly towards the door, knowing that Sheppard knew what he was doing, was rotating with him to keep him in sight, was _letting_ him go.

"You've got the Pegasus galaxy looking to both of us, now, for leadership. For help. I don't even want to imagine the mess you'd make of things if you lost your Rodney. Not even to old age."

John was at the door, then through it, body automatically grabbing his gear and strapping on his P-90 as he ran flat out to the lab building.

"McKay... MCKAY!" he bellowed, bursting through the door, covering the whole room with his weapon. "Let him go," he snapped, too angry to play it cool. "Just, just get the _hell_ away from him."

Ronon, not _his_ Ronon, who was still with the Merarians and their wine festival, but the replicant, stood slowly, then backed away with his hands up.

On the floor, McKay was crouched over Rodney, petting his head with an oddly tender look on his face.

"I told him what we were going to do, you know," McKay said suddenly, not looking up from himself. "He agreed to it."

"Agreed to what?" John ground out, wanting to snatch that hand away from Rodney, wanting so badly to see Rodney's eyes open, to know that it was still him in there.

"Oh, we didn't infect him with nanites or anything," McKay shrugged, finally looking up at John. "Just a quick, surgical strike. In and out, nothing left behind." And he looked so pleased with himself, so _Rodney_, that the muzzle of John's P-90 wavered and fell, because even though this wasn't his Rodney it still felt like ten kinds of wrong to be pointing a gun at that face.

"We just... tinkered a little," Sheppard drawled from the doorway behind him. "Prevented the telomeres from shortening. You know, re-wrote his base code."

"You son of a bitch!" John shouted, turning and bringing his weapon to bear on his smirking double. From behind,John felt a spike of pain up his neck that exploded into his head. Ronon, disarming him and forcing him to his knees before he could fire a single shot.

John blinked, and found that he was down, found that his legs just wouldn't hold him up. He'd completely lost control of the situation, failed to protect his team in every respect. "Jesus, Rodney, wake up," he pleaded, crawling since his legs were still on vacation somewhere. John hoped they were having a nice time, hopefully somewhere that a person's double didn't get you freakishly turned on and then stuck a knife in your back where you weren't looking.

"Rodney, wake the _fuck_ up!"

"S'okay," Rodney mumbled, finally, eyes still closed. "Feels nice, like, well, it's not like anything else, really. But still, nice."

"Rodney," John breathed, stricken. "God, Rodney. What in the world made you think... " he ran his shaking hands over Rodney's face, batting away McKay's hands and skimmed down over Rodney's chest, his stomach, as though he might be able to read with his palms and skin the billions of small changes that had been made. "Are you, is it still, you know, _you_?"

"Of course it's still him!" snapped McKay angrily. "What kind of monsters do you take us for? I'll have you know-"

"McKay!" Sheppard barked, gesturing to him and Ronon to follow him out. "Give them a minute, will ya?"

John glared at all of them as they left, glumly aware that every one of them was absolutely immune.

"Hey," Rodney said, catching John's hand weakly in his own. "S'good, like I said. I wanted this."

"Rodney, you can't," John shook his head, dizzy from the blow, from his own horrifying self-knowledge, from all of it. "They'll find this, eventually, on our physicals. They'll notice, and then you won't be able to go back, Rodney. Not to Earth or your sister, not to any of it. Did you even think of that?"

"Course I did. But you know, they would have noticed you eventually, anyway," Rodney waved dismissively. "God, this floor is _killing_ my back, help me up..."

"Rodney," John snapped, then sighed and pulled him up anyway. And maybe Rodney would be too woozy from whatever they'd done to notice if he just wrapped himself around him and held on for a minute. "You can't trust them, Rodney. God only knows what they've really done."

"Hey, it's okay, don't worry. You worry too much. They're our friends, John. They're us. We risk our lives for them, they do it for us. And who knows, we may even live long enough for this whole not-aging thing to be a problem."

"Way to be an optimist, McKay," John said sourly. "The problem is, they're _not_ us. You can't trust that-"

"Oh, what? I can't trust them because they've got nanites inside them? Well whoo-hoo. What if they decide they can't trust _us_ because we've got, oh, let's say _bacteria_ inside us? Could be pretty scary, those bacteria could man up and form a Mensa society any day now!"

"It's not remotely the same," John insisted, pulling back and glaring into Rodney's face. "All I'm saying is-"

"What you're saying is that they're less human than us because they were made with machines instead of a good old fashioned placenta and a bag of plasma, which is just ludicrous, just another example of rigid, military thinking that-"

"Shut up, McKay!" John hissed, slapping his palm over Rodney's mouth and leaning close, so close that his mouth was right up against the back of his own hand, his nose brushing Rodney's.

"Listen to me, will you? What I'm saying is that they're not us. It's, they've, they've experienced something different than us, and that mean's _they're_ different. Got it? Look," he said, speaking quietly, intensely to the angry blue eyes. "If I was that Sheppard and if I got a new piece of intel that might tell me that my operations, my team, were threatened by Atlantis, do you think I would hesitate to take the other me out of the equation? Do you think _he_ would?"

Rodney's eyes became a little less certain, and John pressed his point. "No, because I'm willing to die to keep my team safe, and so is he, and we _both know it_. I would kill me in a heartbeat, and probably thank myself for it. Our only imperative, Rodney, is to keep our people safe. And someday, someday there might be something that would make one or both of us an unacceptable risk to each other.

"I'm not talking about being human, Rodney. I'm talking about being me."

"But," Rodney stammered, pulling John's hand away, "but you two, you'd never, I mean, you're each other, for gods sake-"

"Every time we come here," John insisted, not backing up an inch, needing Rodney to get this, "every damn time, we have to size each other up. Every time it's a roll of the dice. What he did today, god, who knows what the fuck he was up to. Trying to get some leverage over me, working you to get to me..."

The head-slap came out of nowhere, and John gaped in surprise at Rodney.

"What? If you're going to completely abandon logic I guess I don't have to worry about keeping your brain from going soft."

"McKay-"

"No, now you listen to me, Colonel," Rodney interrupted, poking John in the chest, his crooked, mobile mouth barely an inch from John's own. "He did this, this remarkable thing for me, for _us_, because he's human. Because he's got a soul, maybe more of one than you do, sometimes."

"Hey, now-"

"He did it because he knew that he couldn't stand to watch his team grow old and die, to be left alone in this fucking harsh life out here, and he didn't want that for you, either. And if you can't trust your own self then you can trust me, because I, at least, don't have your masochistic streak and would apparently never do anything as stupid to myself as you would."

Rodney just sat there glaring, and John, John felt something great and terrible bloom in his chest, something that squeezed and burnt and felt horribly like hope.

"I'm not wrong," Rodney insisted, taking the back of John's neck and shaking him gently. "I'm almost never wrong, and certainly not when it comes to taking care of myself."

That surprised a huff of laughter from John.

"I'm gonna remember this conversation the next time you volunteer us all to walk through three miles of ice cold mud, then complain about it afterwards."

"That was a tactical miscalculation, directly attributable to hypothermia. Now c'mon. I don't know about you, but I'm starving. And we need to figure out how we're going to break this to Teyla and Ronon."

John put a hand on Rodney's shoulder, not quite ready to let him get up and shuffle around and introduce all that _space_ between them just yet. "Um, look, I," he stumbled helplessly, not even knowing what the hell he wanted to say.

"I love you too, you moron," Rodney sighed, petting John's hair with one broad hand. Then he leaned in to brush his lips gently, god, wonderfully against John's and who would have ever guessed, but this was it, what he was trying to, but he'd never... and John kissed him back, closing his eyes and for once just accepting. And he read in Rodney's kiss the tender, awful desperation that had led him to agree to be changed, to re-write his DNA just to keep John safe and close, and he opened his mouth and touched his tongue to Rodney's and gave everything in him over to Rodney for safekeeping. Because there wasn't really any way to go back anyway, and now they would have to be strong for each other, and fuck it if he wasn't going to have some joy along the way.

They pulled back after a bit, and John looked over Rodney's shoulder at Sheppard, McKay, and Dex standing out in the yard, late afternoon sun painting their skins a golden tan. He held his duplicate's gaze, slowly nodded, then pressed his face to Rodney's temple. Sheppard nodded once in return, then hooked McKay's head in a playful tussle, wrangling his team back to the mess hall.

"C'mon I'll buy you dinner at the wine festival," he promised, his lips pressed to Rodney's ear. "Let's go home."

fin


End file.
